Q: What's the
story behind The Science Writers' Handbook, and how is it especially helpful in today's market?

A: The Science Writers’
Handbook grew out of the longest, most circuitous, most fascinating
conversation I’ve ever been part of. For nearly eight years, an informal online
group of 30-plus freelance science writers have been sharing strategies,
celebrating successes and commiserating about frustrations in the field.

We
call ourselves SciLance (science freelancer – get it?), and a few years ago we
realized that we’d confronted most every problem a science writer could run
into, and solved a fair number of them – not least by finding mutual support
within the group.

Sharing our collective insights seemed like the natural next
step, and that’s what The Science Writers’ Handbook is, essentially – a
collected and codified version of our tribal wisdom. It’s a “how to” guide for
writing about science for the public, but also a “why to,” and even a “how not
to go broke or crazy while trying to” guide, too.

We focused in the title on
our shared passion for writing about science. But the book could just as
honestly been called “The Freelance Writers’ Handbook.” We all have been, or
currently are freelance writers. And the lessons we’ve learned – about the
craft of nonfiction writing, certainly, but also about the business side of
freelancing, and even the social and emotional effects of working for oneself
in an often-solitary craft – apply to freelancers in any field.

More people are working as
freelancers than ever before, and interest in science writing is absolutely
exploding. We wrote the book to help current and future colleagues, writing
students, scientists with a passion for communicating with the public and
anyone else interested in science writing to achieve their goals without having
to go through quite as much heartache and angst on the way as we all did.

Q: What is your advice when it comes to pitching a science story to an editor?

A: Be firm in your pitch, but
flexible in the follow up. With the exception of the hardcore science press –
the news sections of academic journals, for example – most publications think
of science stories as optional coverage. That means you’ll often do better with
a feature pitch than a news pitch.

When you first approach an editor with a
science story idea, you’re really showing her how you think, and how well you
can refine a broad area of research into a specific story, with characters,
plot, some sort of narrative arc and crucially, a sense of how the science will
be relevant to the publication’s readers. You need to have a well-defined,
well-developed idea to do that.

Sometimes, success means getting to do the
story you pitch. But for first-timers especially, success just as often means
coming up with a new take, or entirely new story idea, in collaboration with an
editor who simply likes the way you think, but wants you to think about
something else entirely.

Q: You're also the co-author
of On Call In Hell. How did you end up working with Cdr. Richard
Jadick on the book?

A: That was a project of
opportunity, though one that I was very passionate about. I had recently gone
freelance, after working as a staffer first at Newsweek, then at US News &
World Report. A former colleague from Newsweek had unearthed the story at the
heart of the book – the heroic efforts of Navy medical personnel to keep
Marines alive during the second battle of Fallujah, in 2004 – and encouraged my
eventual co-author to share his experiences as their leader. She introduced me
to Jadick, and he enlisted my help to report and write the book.

It isn’t
science writing per se, but like many science journalists I’m a writer first –
I just happen to be passionate about science, too. The human drama of the story
is front and center, though the science of battlefield medicine plays an
important role, too.

Q: In your book Sex and
War, you and your co-author, Malcolm Potts, write that "empowering
women reduces the risk of violent conflict." What led you to that
conclusion, and what steps should be taken, in your opinion, to move in that
direction?

A: It’s a conclusion I
resisted at first -- until I’d spent several years excavating and examining the
evidence from history, biology, anthropology and more. Simply put, human males
are responsible for the great majority of violent conflict through time and
across cultures and developmental stages.

There are very good evolutionary
reasons why this would be so, but at the same time, we live in what is probably
the least violent era of human history. It’s hard to get your head around that
fact, but it’s true – despite our wars and crime, despite our technology of
destruction, an individual’s chance of dying through violent conflict today is
almost certainly lower than at any previous time in human history.

There are
several mechanisms that explain this, including the development of ethical and
moral codes against killing civilians, and the expansion of “in groups” to
include larger and larger swaths of humanity. For every mechanism we examined
though, the relative political power of women was directly linked to lower
rates of violent conflict and violent deaths.

This is very obviously, very
brutally, still not the prevailing situation in many areas of the world,
including such central African countries as The Democratic Republic of Congo,
and in Afghanistan, the tribal regions of Pakistan, and elsewhere.

The two key steps to encourage more
empowerment of women are protection first, and education second.
Simultaneously, really. These same regions of the world are desperate for human
capital, and women very often posses the courage and vision to become agents of
peaceful development, against great odds. But that can’t be achieved without a
baseline level of education and security.

Q: What are you working on
now?

A: The topic is still under
wraps, but my next book will be a collaboration with my father [Michael Hayden], a historian and
author. We share a passion for understanding human nature, from distinct
perspectives. We’re working on blending our historical, scientific and
experiential perspectives to, you know, solve all the world’s problems. Or at
least tell some engaging yarns.

A: The conversations that
started The Science Writers’ Handbook are still going strong. Only they’re not
just for SciLancers anymore. We’ve started a webpage, at
pitchpublishprosper.com, where we’re discussing the craft, commerce and
community of science writing every day. Come on and join the conversation!

Q: Two of your books, A Tale of Two Seders and Matzah Ball, deal with the Passover holiday. What about
Passover makes it a good subject to write about, especially for kids?

A: Passover (Pesach) includes so many tangible symbols,
which makes it very accessible to people of all ages, including children. And
the Seder’s setting is at home, where children can celebrate comfortably. Of course,
on a practical level as far as the world of publishing/marketing goes, people
are also often looking for a meaningful Afikomen present to give to a child,
and a book is still the perfect gift.

In terms of the particular topics of my two Passover books,
Passover does often coincide with the beginning of the baseball season; both
represent spring and renewal in many ways. In Matzah Ball, I deal with the
issue of “feeling different” (which in the case of the child in the book means
he can’t eat the usual ballpark food); I discovered after publishing it, that
other minority groups related to it well. Mostly, I wrote it because I’m
a fanatic baseball fan!

My other Passover book, A Tale of Two Seders, deals with the
family dynamics of Passover, in this particular case, two parents who are
divorced. The idyllic picture of the traditional family gathered together
around the Passover Seder table turns out to be more complicated for the child
in the book; this reverberates for people in other holiday situations, like
Thanksgiving. How do you “make it work” when your family is “different”? In
this case, the charoset recipe serves as the perfect metaphor!

Q: What reaction have readers had to your book Where
Do People Go When They Die?, and why did you decide to write a book
explaining death to children?

A: What most surprised me in the reaction to Where Do People Go When They Die? is that so many adults tell me it has served as a catalyst
for THEM to discuss death and their beliefs about an afterlife with other
adults! I thought I had written a book for children, but it turns out death is
such a taboo topic that this simple book often helps adults to find a way to
talk about their own feelings, beliefs, hopes. It is a book which also appeals
to people of different religions or who are not religious at all; it is not for
Jews only (this often happens with my books; I discovered to my surprise that
many Christian groups really appreciated the “Elijah” figure in Matzah Ball!).

I wrote Where Do People Go When They Die? because I
discovered I (as a Rabbi) needed a book like that to recommend to parents
of young children who had experienced the death of a loved one, and who were
trying to find appropriate language to discuss it with them. The illustrations
in the book are very colorful and warm, not at all “scary”, and the words and
pictures together enable parents to broach the subject. It also allows parents
to be able to say that people have different ideas about what happens after a
person dies, and that there doesn’t have to be one pat answer.

Q: You were one of the first women rabbis in Reform Judaism.
How did your own experience inspire you to write Ima on the Bima?

A: I wrote Ima on the Bima because I came up with the title
and knew that one of my colleagues would no doubt write such a book, so why not
me? I was one of the early female rabbis, and I knew that there were no
children’s books which included a woman rabbi. I also discovered that there
were no books just talking about what rabbis do. And in fact it is important to
note that nowhere in the book does the child say anything about it being
strange our unusual that her MOM is a rabbi, because for children of that
generation (the book was published in 1986), it was just a fact of life, it was
not unusual for them. That’s what they grew up with! I have recently
authored an essay for the Central Conference of American Rabbis for an upcoming
anthology about the 40th anniversary (2012) of women in the rabbinate, in which
I re-examine Ima on the Bima from the perspective of 27 years later.

Q: Another of your books, "Mommy Never Went to Hebrew
School," deals with religious conversion. How did you come up with the particular
characters for that story?

A: Again, I wrote Mommy Never Went to Hebrew School because
I couldn’t find children’s books about the topic of conversion to Judaism, and
yet so many children were growing up with parents who had converted, and it is
important for children to see themselves in literature. My publisher, KAR
BEN (later bought by Lerner Publishing), recognized that new kinds of books
needed to be published for a new world of Jewish children, who couldn’t see themselves
in the “old school” of Jewish children’s literature. It was actually a very
daring venture, because the Jewish children’s publishing world is a small
niche, and there were very traditional Jews who would not purchase a book with
a woman rabbi for example (there were Jewish bookstores who wouldn’t even sell
Ima on the Bima at first!) or in which there was full equality between men and
women, etc.

Q: Are you working on another children's book?

A: I’m working on several different writing projects,
including another children’s book. In the past couple of years, I’ve been
writing blogs (on my Women’s Rabbinic Network site, for example), articles for
Haaretz.com, two essays for LILITH magazine, the essay for the CCAR anthology,
and am hoping (as I retire from my full-time congregational position at the end
of May) to work on a longer (perhaps even adult) project as well. I think there
are still underserved areas to be explored in Jewish children’s literature,
e.g. Jewish children’s relationships with children from other religions, the
impact of interfaith marriage, and many others. I may want to write a follow-up
to Ima as well.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Thank you for asking me to share my thoughts with you.
I’m available for speaking engagements and book fairs, so if anyone is
interested, you can contact me at breenport@gmail.com.

Q: You have written three "conventional" novels
and one novel in the form of a scrapbook. Which format do you prefer, and why?

A: For now, I would say that I prefer the form of a
scrapbook novel.I have collected
vintage scrapbooks and photographs since I was in high school.This led me to a graduate degree in American
History, and a 15-year career as an archivist at the Peabody/ Essex Museum in
Salem, and Harvard’s Houghton Library.In doing research for my three earlier novels, I studied historic
photographs and scrapbooks (especially the ones kept by Zelda and Scott
Fitzgerald), and was struck by the storytelling power of visual material.

In making The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, it was exciting to
combine words and vintage ephemera.

Q: The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt takes place in the 1920s,
and your previous novel, Gatsby's Girl, deals in part with a similar time period.
What about that period intrigues you?

A: I have been fascinated by the 1920s ever since I was a
little girl and used to pore over my grandmother’s scrapbooks from her
glamorous days as a flapper in Paris.I
loved the clothes, the haircuts, the grand ocean liners, the cars,. The 1920s
were a period when every aspect of American life and culture was upended. There
was the advent of new technology such as the movies, radio, and the automobile.
There were radical modern experiments in literature, art, and music.Women’s lives were dramatically
transformed.Women could vote, drive,
work, and live on their own.They could
forgo marriage, and have many of the sexual and social freedoms that men had.In other words, a perfect setting for a novel
with a female heroine.

Q: Jackie by Josie, your first novel, also looks at history,
in its case, that of Jackie Kennedy. What got you interested in doing a novel
with a Kennedy theme?

A: At Harvard, I cataloged the papers of the journalist
Teddy White, who wrote The Making of the President, 1960.After that, I worked very briefly for the
celebrity biographer Ed Klein doing research on Jackie Kennedy.That gave me the inspiration for the frustrated
and hapless research assistant in Jackie by Josie.

Q: Your second novel, Lucy Crocker 2.0, was published in
2000 and its characters are involved in running a software company. Why did you
pick this theme for the book?

A: I am the mother of three sons who at that time were obsessed
with a fantasy computer game, and I found myself becoming addicted too.The game had been designed by a husband and
wife team, which provided the inspiration for Lucy Crocker.

Q: You've written that you're now working on another
scrapbook novel. What historical period are you looking at this time, and why?

A: My new scrapbook novel is about a war bride during World War
II.My office is completely buried by
ration cards, war bonds, war time letters, and old issues of Life
magazine.The clothes, the music, the
movies are all so high octane and glamorous.I think this may be my favorite subject and time period yet.

Q: You have written for
adults and for children. Do you prefer one type of writing over the other, and
if so, why?

A: I get this question a lot,
and I always have a tough time answering it. Usually, I try to avoid the whole
thing by saying that I like children readers better because they’re cuter.
Which is true—the cuter part, I mean—but evasive. This time, I’ll attempt a
real answer. Here’s what I like about writing for kids: you must know how it’s
going to end when you begin. You have to keep the writing tight; you can’t be
scampering down tangential paths or introducing subsidiary ideas that don’t
pertain to the story. It’s a little like poetry, in that the form demands
distillation and a very clear mind.

Here’s what I like about writing for grownups: you don’t
have to know every single thing before you begin. Meandering is allowed. You
can introduce ideas that don’t play out for a very long time. You can hint at
things. You can imply things. There is kissing.

In other words, what I like about writing for kids is
exactly the opposite of what I like about writing for grownups. I don’t exactly
know what to make of that in terms of preference. I guess I’m glad I don’t have
to choose between them.

Q: Did you expect The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
to be such a huge bestseller, and what about it do you think appealed to so
many people? Would your aunt have been surprised at the reception the book has
had?

A: Well, we had a hint that
it was going to be popular when there was an auction for US publication rights.
And we thought it boded well that foreign rights were sold to twelve publishers
before the book was edited. And then when the booksellers who read the advance
copies kept raving about it—that seemed positive. But nothing, nothing, could
have prepared me for the tidal wave that occurred when the book was published.

Why do I think the book had such appeal? Because it’s
exactly like Mary Ann. I never in
forty-five years encountered anyone who could resist Mary Ann’s
storytelling.She delighted,
entertained, and enchanted everyone she ever met. Just like The Guernsey
Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

The
one person who might not have seen it like this is Mary Ann herself. I think she’d
have been shocked at the uproar. She was, actually, a rather shy person, and
she lived a pretty quiet life, so I doubt she would have enjoyed touring and
being interviewed. But she would have loved hearing from all the readers who
adored the book, and I like to think she’s been reading those letters and
emails over my shoulder for the past five years.

Q: You write on your website that you're a big fan of Edward Eager, who wrote Half Magic and other classics,
and that the title of your children's book The Magic Half is partly
inspired by Eager. What about his books do you particularly like?

A: I am a big fan of Eager in
particular and what I call domestic magic in general. What Eager does is place
magic in the context of regular life—as opposed to fantasy, in which the tale
occurs in another, magical world.As a
kid, I much preferred domestic magic, because it helped me maintain my hope
that someday, somehow, I’d have a magical experience myself.I also love Eager’s books (all of them!)because they’re character-driven, which is
rarely the case in a magic story. All too often, writers of magic stories opt
to resolve all issues by means of magic, because they can and because it’s
easy. Unfortunately, it’s also boring.

Q: How did you come up with
the idea for your "Ivy and Bean" series for kids?

A: When she was seven, my
poor kid ran out of books to read. I was outraged. I mean, I’ve run out of
books to read, but I’m fifty.She had
only been reading for a year, and it didn’t seem fair.I was in a total snit until I thought, Hey,
wait, I’m a writer. I can write her a book.So I asked her whether she’d rather read a book about real life or about
magic, and she said she wanted to read a book about herself. Cool, I thought. I
can do that. And I did.

Q: You also have written several books under the name Ann Fiery. Why did you
choose to use a different name for those books?

A: My real name is Ann Fiery
Barrows. Are you getting that? My middle name is Fiery. Fiery.What a happening name! And it’s buried there
in the middle, where no one ever sees it.When I started writing, I thought, Here at last is my chance to display
my cool middle name. Ann Fiery.Oh my
god, what a fantastic pseudonym: Ann Fiery. Ann Fiery, author of the
best-selling...

Yeah, right. No one tells you about the pseudonymic cauldron
of doom. They just let you go right ahead and throw yourself into it. The
pseudonymic cauldron of doom is MAJOR SOCIAL ANXIETY caused by not knowing
whether you’re supposed to be acting like an author or yourself.E.g.: when signing a book for someone who
knows you as Annie Barrows, are you supposed to sign “Annie Barrows” or are you
supposed to sign “Ann Fiery”? And if you do sign “Annie Barrows,” does the
owner technically possess an autographed book or not? And what if people start
calling you Ann, which you’ve always loathed? And what if people start asking for
Ann on the phone, heretofore the signal that you can hang up because only
salespeople call you Ann, but now...

And before you know it, you’re fleeing madly through
darkened alleys, grunting and shrieking.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Ooooh, the tenth Ivy and
Bean book is coming out this fall! It’s called Ivy and Bean Take the Case, and
it’s more or less Ivy and Bean’s answer to Nancy Drew. I think it’s totally
hilarious.

My next adult novel will be coming along in Spring 2014. It
doesn’t have a title yet, but I can tell you that it’s set in 1938, and it’s
about a girl who’s working on the Federal Writers Project. She’s sent,
protesting vigorously, to a small Southern town to write its history, and finds
herself boarding with a family that turns out to have played quite a big role
in said history. Everyone who’s ever read the manuscript describes the family
as terrifically eccentric, which I don’t understand at all. They seem completely
normal to me. Also funny—they crack me up.They’ve been my best friends for the last five years, and already I’m
missing writing about them.

Q: How did you come up with the character of the Cursing
Mommy, who first appeared in some of your New Yorker columns, and do you know
actual women who remind you of her?

A: The Cursing Mommy started as a joke in our family. Our
daughter had some very well-brought-up friends when we lived in Montana, and
they were in the back seat when Jay, my wife, was driving them somewhere. In
traffic another driver cut Jay off, and she expressed herself forcefully, and
one of the little girls whispered to my daughter, "Cora, your Mommy
cursed!" When I was growing up there was a mom in our neighborhood who
cursed eloquently-- her name was Mrs. Erskine-- and to this day my brother can
do a beautiful imitation of her, though she is long departed. Jay wants me to
make clear that the Cursing Mommy is based more on me than on anyone else. I'm
the person in our family who tends to fly off the handle.

Q: Was it difficult to write in a female voice, and did you
ever consider writing from the perspective of a "Cursing Daddy"?

A: I found writing in the CM's voice very easy. That's why I
decided to write a whole book based on her. I never considered doing a Cursing
Daddy. A dad who curses is less funny, somehow. The dads in my book tend to
weep helplessly.

Q: Your books span a wide variety of subjects and themes,
from fiction to humorous essays to well-reported non-fiction. Is there a genre
you prefer?

A: I prefer any book that yields good results. That changes
with circumstances. I love to write humorous fiction when I feel it's working
well. I have to say that humor can be a lot of fun to write-- but in any piece
of writing, the person who's supposed to be getting the most out of it and
having the fun is the reader, not the writer.

Q: You have written for The New Yorker since 1974. How has
the magazine changed over the years, and how has your own writing been
influenced by the years you've spent there?

A: The New Yorker does not have the pages it had when I started out so its
writers have less space. Brevity and conciseness are more important now.
There's less emphasis on the writer as a self, I think. I feel less inclined to
emote than I did when I was in my twenties and thirties. The New Yorker has
been a wonderful teacher for me. There are always good writers appearing in it--
new and old. I am always seeing work in the magazine that I can learn from.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: These days I'm working on New Yorker articles and on a
book about the closing of the Stella D'oro bakery in the Bronx. The book is
based on a New Yorker article that appeared last year.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My daughter, Cora, is now grown up, and she has become a
writer, and one of the new New Yorker contributors that I'm learning from. I
think her humor piece in the magazine just last week is one of the best it has
published in recent memory. I'm very proud of her.

Q: How do you think law enforcement and
government officials handled the events in Boston this past week?

A: I think quite well in a number of
different respects. First, the FBI was absolutely methodical in the
investigation; they acted very quickly…. Their first priority was to protect
the public from other attacks, then figure out who did it, then capture them,
and eventually prosecute them. It strikes me that they threw an enormous amount
of resources at this case….

It’s a difficult dilemma: whether to
release the photos [of the suspects. Law enforcement] benefited from all the
technology; there were so many images of the Marathon, they were able to go
through the pictures very quickly, and use technology to make the pictures as
clear as possible. Within hours of the blast, they were fanned out at Logan
[airport in Boston looking] for people were leaving the city [after being at
the Marathon], to get their camera phones [and check for photos]. I’m not sure
[there was a photo from those people at Logan that] made a difference, but it tells you how painstaking
they were. It was very impressive.

Q: You raise the question, "Can
you kill or capture bad guys wherever you find them while staying true to
American values and the rule of law?" How successfully do you think the
Obama administration has handled that issue, and how was that question relevant
this past week?

A: I was thinking about that this
morning. The book is called “Kill or Capture” because it goes to that very
difficult dilemma that America is dealing with. If you’re in a position to
capture a suspected terrorist, what do you do with him? The politics of
detention in the war on terror is very polarized…

[One] theory [holds] that the
administration has decided it’s not going to capture terrorists, it would
rather kill them, because it didn’t want to deal with the politics of
detention.

All those issues are now coming up in
this particular case….The administration, with four years of experience, is now
much more confident in how to handle these types of cases; there’s less
hand-wringing over how to handle them….

Q: What would you say are the biggest
similarities and differences between the Bush and Obama administrations'
approaches to fighting terrorism?

A: You have to remember the climate
these administrations operated in. The Bush administration, at least the first
year after 9/11—the country was still traumatized, there were worries about
major follow-on attacks. They were operating in a climate of fear. It would be
hard to know how any other administration would have reacted.

Having said that, there are very
significant differences. First, the Bush administration from day one, in a
pretty dogmatic way, said: We’re changing the paradigm in terms of law
enforcement, we are at war; the criminal justice system is not tough enough to
deal with the threat that we are facing. The Bush administration went down the
path to war, and it led to controversy: enhanced interrogation techniques,
Guantanamo, were all justified by the notion that we were at war.

The Obama administration has accepted
the premise that we are at war with al Qaeda; it has embraced the idea that the
laws of war apply. In [its] first three months, the Obama administration
embraced many of the legal arguments the Bush administration had used, but said
we are going to pursue a hybrid strategy. When it makes sense to use the [rules
of] war, we will; when it makes sense to use the criminal justice system, we
will do that.

It wasn’t only about idealism, it was
hard-nosed pragmatic reasons as well. Sometimes the criminal justice system is
more effective. Look at the 9/11 cases that are languishing in Guantanamo. The
military commission system is very untested; [people are] not sure certain
legal theories can be used to prosecute terrorists. It’s a hybrid approach.
That is a significant difference.

There are others as well—the rhetoric,
how the Obama administration talks about these issues. What was striking about
Boston was Obama’s emphasis on resilience: We’re not going to be terrorized.
The conviction that you play into terrorist hands if you have a hysterical
response to terrorist attacks. You saw that very much on display when he talked
about the attack.

Q: What about the idea of shutting a
city down, as Boston was last Friday? Would that strategy be used again?

A: It will be [decided] case by case.
But there is a danger when you lock a city down, that it sends a message to the
terrorists. For a lot of terrorists, what they wanted was to cause as much
economic damage to the U.S. as possible. AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula] has said, we don’t need to do a spectacular attack in the U.S.; a
couple hundred dollar [attack] can cause panic.

On the other hand, having an armed
terrorist on the loose, it doesn’t strike me as an overreaction to shut down a
city for a particular time. They lifted the lockdown before the second suspect
was caught. How was he caught? When the lockdown was lifted, a resident walked
out of his house and found the guy. Sometimes it takes a whole community to
catch a terrorist and bring the person to justice. It can work either way.

Q: Was there anything that particularly
surprised you in the course of your work on Kill or Capture?

A: There were lots of things that
surprised me. What I tried to do was to focus on the human dimensions of
national security decision-making, and the struggles inside the administration
about balancing law, security, and morality. I was surprised at how wrenching
these decisions were. It was heartening in a way.

What surprised me the most was
President Obama’s very personal involvement in the killing decisions, the
drones and other killing decisions….I learned that President Obama signed off
on individual killing decisions—it stunned me….

Obama was elected in part to wind down
the wars of 9/11, get out of Iraq and [eventually] Afghanistan, yet he faced a
continuing threat. It was hard to find a way to balance the interests. The
drone campaign was appealing to him.

Q: Do you expect any changes in how the
Obama administration deals with terrorism and counterterrorism issues as his
second term continues?

A: Yes, and the Boston case was
reflective of that. It’s hard to capture terrorists. They tend to be in remote
areas, or in countries where we don’t want boots on the ground. With captures,
including this case in Boston, the administration said we are going to try
these people in civilian courts, we’re not going to send them to Guantanamo.
They have developed more confidence in these cases. The American people by and
large have been supportive. That’s a trend we’re going to see continue. Not to
say that there won’t be a case of an al Qaeda [leader] being caught, and [in
that case] maybe they would decide to put him in a military commission. …

Another thing that bears close watching
is what happens to the drone program over the next couple of years. It’s become
more and more controversial. There’s a growing level of [concern] in the
administration that if they want to maintain public support, they are going to
have to be more transparent.

Q: You have
written, "My two implants make me irreversibly computational, a living
example of the integration of humans and computers." How closely do you
think humans and computers are already connected, and how much more connected
do you think they can become?

A: That is
from my first book, Rebuilt. Right now they’re connected in the sense that we
spend all our lives around computers. Most people I know never get more than
five feet away from their iPhone, ever.

I’ve gone rather further than that in
actually having chips surgically installed in my head that send data directly
to my auditory nerve. A surgeon inserted sixteen electrodes into my inner ear
that fire my auditory nerves. There’s a gadget I wear on my ear that takes in
sound, digitizes it, and sends it by radio to an implanted chip in my skull.
The chip figures out how to parcel the binary data to my sixteen electrodes,
and I get an experience that is sort of like hearing.

People have
seen this as a harbinger of the day where everyone has implants that enhance
their brains or senses. But I think it’s important to make a distinction
between prosthetic implants and enhancement implants.

Prosthetic implants are what I have. I need
them because I’m deaf. They required surgery, which is always risky, but for me
the risk-to-reward ratio was very high: low risk, very high reward.

Enhancement
implants are a different story. No one knows what the rewards would be, and the
risks would not be zero. One thing I learned from getting a cochlear implant is
how complex and unpredictable the body is, and that makes me wary of bold
predictions.I’m not saying it won’t
happen, I’m just saying that it’s very far off.

Having said
that, in my second book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity,
Computers, and the Internet, I took on the role of technofuturist. I wrote
about implants that could, in theory, someday, allow the sense-impressions and
feelings of one person to be transmitted directly to the brain of another
person, or even more profoundly, to groups of other people. A kind of
collective awareness, or telepathy.

The point was that the real future of
implanted devices isn’t going to be to enhance our existing abilities, but to
let us do new things entirely. That’s always been the deal with technology: it
creates new ways of doing things. Telephones, email, and Facebook don’t really
let us do the old ways better. They open up entirely new ways of communicating.
I see that pattern continuing someday with implanted technologies, once the
risk-to-reward ratio becomes favorable.

Q: Part of World Wide Mind deals with how you met your wife. What do you see
as a good balance between being connected to technology and having links to
other people? How can someone find the balance that's right for them?

A: There
must have been fifty books published in the last few years about how addictive
Internet technologies have become, with people worrying that they are
distorting and harming human relationships. It’s easy to be afraid of harms we
already know about, while not seeing the benefits that we presently can’t yet
imagine.

In World Wide Mind I tried to offer a visionary but also more balanced
view of the future. The “telepathy” I talk about in World Wide Mind could be
like what we have now, only a hundred times more compelling and addictive. What
do we do about that?

In the book I interwove the technology with a story of
teaching myself to connect better with people face-to-face. I wrote about going
to workshops in Northern California where people would do exercises like
looking into each other’s eyes and listening without interrupting. Very basic
stuff. However, these are skills usually aren’t taught. We just assume people
are good at them, where in fact often they aren’t.

In the book, I juxtaposed
the high-tech, low-touch future of a World Wide Mind with the high-touch,
low-tech present of the workshops: I thought it was a heady, provocative
combination.

I argued that we need to develop transformative new technologies
and teach ourselves the skills of compassion, listening, and being present in
one’s body. To get a future worth living in, you have to do both. There isn’t
any shortcut. You just have do the hard work of being human.

Q: How hasthe cochlear implant changed your life, and would you recommend them to other
people in your situation?

A: If
cochlear implants didn’t exist I would have had to try to learn sign language
and join the signing deaf community. Nothing against it, but it’s a completely
different world, with its own language and cultural life.

I wanted to stay in
the hearing world I’d grown up in, so cochlear implants were the obvious
choice. They’ve given me back the partial hearing they used to have – I
actually hear better with them than I did with hearing aids.

Before, I could
hear a clock ticking maybe five feet away.Now, it’s twenty or thirty feet.It feels like my arms are five times longer than they used to be.

Everything sounded very weird, of course. When the implant was first turned on,
“What did you have for breakfast?” sounded to me like “Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur
brfzzzzzz.”Teapots sounded like
foghorns instead of whistles.My own
voice sounded either squeakier or hollower, depending on what software I was
using.Paper made bell-like sounds when
I rattled it.I’ve adapted to it, but
it’s still strange.

I would
recommend them to two groups of people: (a) adults who have had hearing for
most of their lives, and (b) children. I would not recommend them to adults who
have never used a spoken language, because in that case the brain doesn’t know
how to hear, and it’s usually too late to start. Implants rarely enable such
users to become skilled in hearing a spoken language.

Cochlear implants are not
for everyone, and it’s up to the medical team and the patient to make a
well-informed decision. In my case the choice was an obvious yes, because I’d
used hearing aids since 3½, had grown up as an oral deaf person, and was
skilled with spoken language.

Q: How much
time in a typical day do you spend on the computer or other devices?

A: Too much.

Q: What are
you working on now?

A: I’d love
to write a book on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and I’m
writing a book proposal for it now. Whether my agent will be able to sell it to
a publisher, that’s anyone’s guess.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Michael Chorost is on Twitter @MikeChorost

Q: What are the biggest "myths" about Washington,
D.C., history that you found to be untrue?

JFL: a. D.C. was built on a swamp.

b. Benjamin Banneker designed the city.

c. Buildings cannot be taller than the Capitol.

BL: That there isn’t any pure D.C. cultural history and
there never has been. There ALWAYS has been.

Q: Why did you decide to write a history of D.C., and how
was it to work together on a project?

JFL: Bob was working at the Post, where he had been covering
the city for many years. I was (and am) a historian specializing in the history
of Washington, D.C. The book editor at the Post, Noel Epstein, knew us both
well and approached us to do a “popular” history of D.C. to commemorate
Congress’s arrival in Washington in 1800. The book was delivered in time for
the 200th anniversary of Congress’s arrival. It was great to work on this
together. Bob found it weird to have to rewrite, but he came around. We agreed
easily on the topics and photo choices. He wrote the text, and I wrote the
captions. I did most of the research; Susan Breitkopf supplied some of it, as
did Suzannah Gonzalez and Lynn Ryzewicz.

BL: Jane is far too gentle here. We are about as
diametrically opposed as two people could be in our basic orientation toward
doing a book. I wanted it to be just a longer newspaper column…. write it,
tweak it, don’t fret over it, call it done, pour another coffee, move on to the
next mountain. Jane wanted (and still wants!) to research, research, research.

Q: What surprised you the most that you discovered in the course of your
research?

JFL: I think it was the indifference of the citizens of the
United States to the aspirations that George Washington and other early leaders
had for their nation’s capital. But that indifference helps explain why we
still don’t have voting rights as well as why D.C. was so slow to develop in
the 19th century.

BL: That D.C. was so slow to become a real city, with basics
like sewers, paved streets, streetcars that went more than a few miles.

Q: If you were to write an update, what would you choose to
include from the past decade of D.C. history?

JFL: If I were going to write an update, I’d want to add
even more to the older history! But for the past decade I would highlight the
demographic changes that have ended the African American dominance of the city
as well as the enormous reinvestment in the oldest sections and the
long-awaited restoration of the 1968 riot corridors.

BL: I’d like to add lots of material about the late 1940s
and 1950s, a period when D.C. underwent immense racial change (and
blockbusting). From the last decade, I’d include the (re)emergence of U Street,
the surge of big-time professional sports (Nationals, Wizards, Caps) and the
ferment over the D.C. public schools (under one of my least favorite humans,
Michelle Rhee).

Q: Are you working on another book?

JFL: Not yet. I have a project based on my master’s thesis
that I’d love to see through . . . one day!

BL: Jane and I have discussed a book about blockbusting in D.C.,
but no action or traction yet.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).